Showing papers by "Mieke Bal published in 1987"

Lethal love : feminist literary readings of biblical love stories

Abstract: Preface Introduction 1 The Emergence of the Lethal Woman, or the Use of Hermeneutic Models Pregnancy and the Limits of Power The Use of Interpretation The Use of Form The Use of Frame-Theory The Use of Narratology The Use of the Text The Use of Symmetry The Use of Frames The Use of the Subject The Use of Competition 2 Delilah Decomposed: SamsonOs Talking Cure and the Thetoric of Subjectivity Reading Heroes Questions Asked and Problems Revealed The Emergence of the Hero Samson and Delilah SamsonOs Death Who Is Samson? Samson, Patriarchy, and Social Reality 3 Heroism and Proper Names, or the Fruits of Analogy Balancing the Tension Starting from a Detail Narrativization of the Proper Name In Search of the Subject In Search of Foundations, or the Subjects versus the Law The Unconscious Performing Speech Acts: Symptoms Reflecting Reflection 4One Woman, Many Men, and the Dialectic of Chronology The Limits of Higher Criticism On the Margins of Anachrony: Paralepsis, or the Deviation from the Straight Path Tamar from Father to Son, or On Subversion Juxtaposition, or Similarity behind Displacement OnanOs Offspring, or How to Conceive Safely TamarOs Matchmaking: The Mirror Stage 5 Sexuality, Sin, and Sorrow: The Emergence of the Female Character Characterizing Character The Emergence of a Myth: Collocation The Emergence of the Human Body: Unaccomplishment The Emergence of the Female Body: Sexual Difference The Emergence of Activity: Sin? The Emergence of Character: Sorrow The Effect of Naming Afterword References Index

Virginity: toward a feminist philology

Abstract: The biblical book of Judges is an extremely violent book. Murder is, one might suggest, the basic event of the book. Some of these murders have young, innocent women as their victims. The best known victim is Jephthah's daughter, sacrificed by her father in Chapter 11. It is said of her that 'she had known no man' (11:40). In the afterlife of the story, Jephthah's daughter has become the nameless virgin, precursor of Mary. In this paper, virginity will be explored as a construct, a danger, and a misunderstanding; as a negation, suspension, and transition: as a gift, a ritual and a taboo. The question to be answered is: what is the meaning of the idea of virginity, and how can philology help, how does it help in practice, to understand the position of Jephthah's daughter? The underlying issue is that of the relations between philology as an academic discipline, narrative, and the politics of gender. The choice of an ancient text to explore this question is motivated by the problem that, as I will contend, is central to these relations: that of distance, strangeness, otherness, and the tendency to counter these frightening features with naturalization, normalization, subsumation of the self. This tendency is generally cultural. As a consequence, the almost exclusive possession of the field of biblical scholarship by men and the same, to a sometimes slightly lesser extent, holds for other fields entails a systematic distortion of concepts which have a specific, genderrelated meaning. Virginity is such a concept and the analysis of this concept in situ , in a specific text wherein it has a crucial position, makes a good case for the general point I wish to make about the interest-orientedness of philology. A semiotic approach that replaces the word in its context and takes signifying systems other than the sheer linguistic-historical into account is needed. I will